Mother and Abundance

Scotland, 1/11. Reveling in the Abundant beauty of Pachamama

Mothers.

Our relationship to them, and sometimes our relationship as them.

It’s complex. Inescapable. A place none of us get to opt out of.

And for me as well as many others, it’s a wild ride.

Over the last while, I’ve been observing something consistently within myself, and as tends to happen, in constellation sessions with my clients or those I attend on a regular basis.

A repeating thread between mother and money. Mother and abundance. Mother and food/nourishment too (though that’s a story for another time).

The mother represents the connection to life itself, to nurture and sustenance, and if this bond is blocked, difficulties may emerge in the ability to receive love, success, and abundance. This is perhaps the single most important principle in understanding the mother-abundance connection.

Our first experience of abundance comes through our mother. Through her body we receive physical and emotional nourishment. We learn love, safety, and what it means to be met. Our capacity to receive later in life takes shape here.

During our time in the womb, we knew nature’s abundance intimitely through her. Everything we needed arrived without effort. We were fed, held, sustained through her. Before we earned anything or achieved anything, we were given life.

After birth, the decisive movement toward the mother involves being fed at her breast, and through her milk we take life outside of her. This fundamental act of nourishment establishes the archetypal pattern for all receiving in life, for our relationship with abundance.

Abundance later in life asks for the same inner movement. Opening. Taking. Letting it in.

When we take our mother in fully, we can take abundance in fully.

When the mother is held at a distance inside, abundance often is too.

When we reject our mother’s love, abundance cannot reach us.

When we turn away from our mother internally, even for good reasons, the body often turns away from receiving itself.

Bert Hellinger taught that parents give and children take. Life flows in one direction. When we interrupt that movement by rejecting what was given, often unconsciously, the system finds another place for the cost to be paid. Frequently, that cost shows up in money.

So what can we do if our relationship with our mothers are fraught, complex, and in some cases, nonexistent. We learn how to take our mother. We learn how to integrate Mother.

Healing the mother wound is essential for attracting abundance.

This does not require your mother to have been perfect. It does not require agreement with her choices or denial of pain. It does not mean we fix her or heal her. It asks something simpler and more radical.

Taking the mother is a specific technical term in Family Constellations that means a movement toward an inner embracing and a deep integration of our mother within us, exactly as she was and is. Receiving what she gave, as she was able to give it. Letting what was given be enough, because it was enough to give us life.

There are other factors at play that can also affect our ability to receive the abundance life has to offer. Hidden loyalties often bind us to our maternal lineage. We may unconsciously replicate our mother’s or grandmother’s relationship with money. Scarcity, struggle, guilt about having more, identification with her hardship, or loyalty to an ancestor who lost everything can all shape our lives. When these loyalties are acknowledged, abundance stops feeling elusive or charged.

Receiving from our parents enables us to give to the world from a fuller place. Because it is our job to take, honor and pass on what our parents have given. We could never repay the debt to them for giving us LIFE itself. So we take what they give with humility and pass it forward without guilt. When that ability to take life from them settles in the body, receiving money becomes effortless.

As I am writing this, I am seeing the raw nature out of my window and it has me thinking about how we can also learn to receive abundance from the Great mother- the earth, pachamama. The living field that continues to feed us long after childhood ends and sustains us throughout our lives with her bounty.

Money is one of the ways Earth’s abundance moves through human systems, in the form of resources, materials, exchange and flow.

When receiving from the personal mother is blocked, receiving from the earth often feels just as complicated.

This could manifest as guilt about taking or receiving, fear of having more than others, not seeing that there is enough for everyone, a sense that abundance is fragile or must be controlled.

The Earth continues to offer boundless abundance. The question is whether the body knows how to take it in, receive it with gratitude. Are we turning toward it as we turn toward mother when we are taking our life from her? Or are we turning away and rejecting the natural order and flow?

Abundance arrives when the body no longer resists taking in what life is already offering.

And for most of us, that work begins with the mother.